Raid 0 and extra drives

[Dalton]

Hi all,
I am completely new to freenas so please excuse my ignorance, I have looked for an answer to my question but havent found a reference using raid 0.

I am using freenas as a media server and at the moment have 2 x 6tb drives as volume movies and two 5tb drives as volume TV. There is no redundancy as I have a lot of smaller capacity drives which hold backups of all my data in the event of failure (anybackup is ideal for this is it allows backups from larger drives to multiple smaller drives) .

I want to expand the existing volumes with 2 x 4tb drives, ideally I would like to add 1x4tb to each volume if possible if this can be done without losing any capacity ie 2x6 +1x4 giving a volume of 16tb. If that cannot be done I can create a third volume of the 2x4tb drives but rather than having volume movies 2 or tv 2 I would like to merge the new volume with one of the existing volumes to retain just two volumes if it is possible.

Although all data is backed up and can be restored if required it would be preferable if I can add the extra drives without losing any existing content.

I understand that this cannot be done with a raid format that provides redundancy but cannot find if it is possible with the raid 0 config.

Any help or advice would be gratefully appreciated and again apologies for any newbie ignorance displayed.

Thanks in advance for any help provided.

 

[sretalla]

It should be fine (since you're not placing any importance on data security... nor performance, since the additional disk will be a stripe member, but your stripe-set will not be evenly balanced across the total capacity).

In the GUI/Storage/Volume Manager, pick a volume to extend with the additional disk (instead of specifying a new volume name). That's it.

 

[Dalton]

It should be fine (since you're not placing any importance on data security... nor performance, since the additional disk will be a stripe member, but your stripe-set will not be evenly balanced across the total capacity).

In the GUI/Storage/Volume Manager, pick a volume to extend with the additional disk (instead of specifying a new volume name). That's it.

Hi stretalla,
thanks for the prompt response, it is appreciated, I have managed to extend the volume using the manual option.

Thanks for your help

 

[sretalla]

Yes, you will see the full capacity of all drives as the pool total, but the data will not be balanced evenly on them (since the added one is essentially empty and the others already presumably mostly full). This will mean that new writes will not benefit from being able to stripe across multiple disks and will instead need to write only to the new disk for quite some time.

(you could correct that by deleting and re-copying all the data back to the pool after adding the disk, then you could benefit from writes being shared across all 3 drives, which would possibly be faster... but we established that this doesn't seem to be your priority, so no need for it).

 

[Dalton]

hI,
thanks for the explanation, everything is much clearer now.